"We're not prudes, we're gynecologists": More palaver from Crimefest panels

Monument
to thousands
of Chouans
who landed
at Carnac
in 1795. 

Here are a few more thought-provoking remarks from panelists at last week's Crimefest in Bristol. Stick with me long enough, and I may tell you what thoughts they provoked.

• "He helped other writers also. He put out the Saint magazine."
Zoe Sharp on the literary philanthropy of Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint.
• "In the cast of cities, bars are closing. The rents are too expensive. ... When streets get too expensive, the first things to close is bars, where people used to meet."
Antonin Varenne
• "The nice thing about writing about Laos is that they've had forty years of civil war, and they can still sit down at the end of the day and have drinks and make jokes."
Colin Cotterill
• "We're not prudes, we're gynecologists."
Lindsey Davis, quoting a regret-filled letter from two fans explaining the offense they took at sexual language in one of her novels.
• "In Glasgow everyone pretends to be working class. It's a kind of reverse snobbery."
Denise Mina on working-class chic in her city

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Another prejudice that might be history

I feel like a man unburdening myself of my sins. First I dropped a prejudice against crime stories set in countries other than the authors' own. Now I'll try to do the same for historical crime fiction.

My hesitation about such writing has two causes. First, is the inability of many authors to dispel the reader's nagging awareness that decades, centuries, even millennia have elapsed between the story's time and the author's. Then there is Lindsey Davis, whose historical research is so good and whose tone is so engagingly breezy that for me the two have interfered with one another, at least in her novels.

But I'm giving her another try because I've just visited the spectacular setting of one of her books. Fishbourne Roman Palace in Fishbourne, West Sussex on England's south coast, contains gorgeous Roman mosaics that are all the more moving because most are in situ, right where they were laid in the first and second centuries. Davis' novel A Body in the Bath House, part of her long-running series about Marcus Didius Falco, the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe/Travis McGee of first-century Rome, sends Falco to far-away Britain in pursuit of some shoddy building contractors who have fled Rome. There, the palace later to be known as Fishbourne is under construction and plagued with problems that include fatal accidents.

At Fishbourne last week, a member of the staff told me that Davis launched her novel at the palace and that she was highly respected by historians and classicists. That and the memory of some funny lines from Davis' other work were good enough for me. I'm reading her again.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Lindsey Davis
Rome crime fiction
historical crime fiction
historical mysteries

A good opening lion

I don't normally read historical mysteries, but it's hard to resist an opening like this, from Lindsey Davis' One Virgin Too Many:

I had just come home after telling my favorite sister that her husband had been eaten by a lion. I was in no mood for greeting a new client.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Lindsey Davis
Rome crime fiction

Beyond Borders? What About Writers Who Cross Them?

What happens when writers explore places, cultures or times especially remote from their own?

Robert van Gulik introduced Western readers to a crime literature that was fully fledged centuries before Lupin burgled, Dupin purloined, or Sherlock Holmes shot up. Yet he acknowledged that he had to choose carefully to find and translate a Chinese detective novel he felt would be accessible to Western readers, the eighteenth-century Dee Goong An, or Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. The book differs in several respects from most of the old Chinese detective novels, and it's delightful (less supernatural emphasis, criminal's identity not revealed at the beginning).

When Van Gulik went on to write his own Judge Dee stories, he made further alterations to the Chinese tradition. He showed a personal, private side to Judge Dee that the old stories never did, for instance. Would he have opened himself to charges of arrogance or cultural imperialism if he did the same today? I think not. Van Gulik was a scholar, a diplomat and a linguist, and the explanatory material he included with each book is almost as much fun as the stories themselves. If you want a painless and entertaining way to learn about Tang Dynasty China, this is it. Furthermore, he declared that he translated the Dee Goong An in order to give Western readers something more authentic than Fu Manchu or Charlie Chan.

Or what about Arthur W. Upfield? Upfield was a white Englishman who lived most of his life in Australia. His wonderful protagonist, Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, was half white, half Australian aborigine. On the one hand, the books could express racial attitudes that would be unfashionable today, to say the least. On the other, Upfield was capable of an almost heartbreaking sympathy for his clever, talented half-caste in a white-dominated society. The "Bony" books appeared between 1929 and 1966. Did the times account for some of the questionable attitudes? Or was the cultural gap just too wide to be bridged fully?

And how about Lindsey Davis? The two of her Marcus Didius Falco short stories I've read were delightful. The "private informer" Falco wisecracks his way through the streets and houses of first-century Rome in stories that offer just enough detail to make for a superbly convincing and unobtrusive setting. And make no mistake: Davis knows her history and archaeology. That may have something to do with why I found the one novel that I tried less satisfying. As light a touch as Davis has, the book had so much period detail, so much interesting period detail, that either the detail detracted from the story, or the story detracted from the detail. I'm still not sure which.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006